Stuffed Crust Pizza on the Trail

Boiling water and making stuffed crust pizza

 This was a largely improvised recipe that turned out to be our new camping favorite.  To make one stuffed crust pizza you will need:

• Two flour tortillas
• pizza sauce
• cheese
• toppings of your choice (ours was pepperoni)

Improvised dutch oven

 I improvised a dutch oven using the two fry pan/lids from our mess kit.  The smaller fry pan is about 8" across and the larger is about 10".  I placed the smaller fry pan on the fire great off set from the fire a bit so it was not catching the full force of the heat.  The ingredients were layered in as follows:

1. Tortilla
2. Pizza sauce
3. Pepperoni
4. Cheese
5. Tortilla
6. Pizza sauce
7. Pepperoni
8. Chesse

On top of the smaller fry pan I placed the large fry pan, right side up and filled it with hot coals.  When cooking with a dutch over you usually want to err on the side of more heat on top and less on the bottom.  Heat rises as you know so the underside will tend to cook faster than the upper side.

Melting cheese

Once the cheese was well melted on top , but not fully browned, I slid the smaller pan over the flames and replaced the top pan still full of coals.  This causes the bottom tortilla to crisp up nicely while the top brown.

Ready to serve!

Here you have the finished product.  It was one of the most amazing things I have ever dined upon on the trail.  Just to be sure it was good as it seemed in the woods we made the same dish again once we had been back home for a week. It was indeed as good, so it was not just deprivation that drove us to crave it.

I am hoping t make it again soon with alfredo sauce and to add more ingredients.  I will let you know how it goes.  What is your favorite deceptively simple trail food?

Packing for a Canoe Trip; My Opinion

A packed and balanced canoe

Canoe camping is a great way for people who are a little leery of "roughing it" to get started in outdoor recreation.  I see it as a perfect next step after car camping.  It is also a way for experienced outdoors folks to hone their skills and push their abilities.  Hiking a pack with the bare essentials does indeed take skill, but paddling a canoe across a bay with a 20 mph breeze 4-points abaft your larboard beam?  That is poetry in motion! (Plus you get to say things like "20 mph breeze 4-points abaft your larboard beam")

In this post I am going to cover what I took on my last Boundary Waters canoe trip.  Did I pack light?  No. Why?  Because I am big for one, and because I didn't have too because we only had three short portages to worry about.  At the end of this post I will go over the items that I did not use and would leave behind next time, as well as the items that I did not use but would take again anyhow.

Our gear

In the above photo you can see the three packs that my wife and I took along on our trip.  The grey one on the left was our food pack and you can see our bear ropes daisy-chained and carabiner clipped to D-rings on the front of the pack.

The red pack in the center is a water proof dry bag made from a rubberized canvas type material that my wife used as her personal pack.

The green pack on the right is a "Duluth" style pack made from a East German Army duffle obtained from Sportsman's Guide that the Amish added leather closure straps and buckles to convert it.

Shelley's pack~33.8 lbs

My wife carried a vintage Eureka Timberline tent (oblong green bag), poncho liner (camo), sleeping bag (beneath tent and poncho liner), toiletries (in zip-lock bag), compression sack with clothes (black), and Thermarest sleeping pad.

To pack the dry bag I first loosely rolled the sleeping pad up then inserted it vertically into the bag and allowed it to unroll again.  The sleeping pad then forms a tube in which the rest of the content of the bag goes   The sleeping pad acts as a barrier between your back and oddly shaped, hard items like mess kits, camp stoves, etc.  Works really slick.  That is a trick I learned in the Forest Service.  At the bottom of the pack I placed the compression sack with the clothes and the sleeping bag, next was the poncho liner, followed by the tent, and topped off with the toiletries.  

When packing up your gear be sure to put the last thing you will want first, and the first thing you will want last.  The tent is left near the top so that if you are setting up camp in the rain or after dark it can be the first thing you lay your hands on.  If it is raining and your tent is on the bottom you will have to lay everything else out in the rain in order to access it.  Bad idea.

My pack~40.8 lbs

 The contents of my pack included (clockwise starting at top left), tool kit bag (made from brown cargo pants leg), first aid kit (zip-lock bag), heavy green wool blanket (beneath & first aid), mess kit, 12'x12' green Etowah tarp form Ben's Backwoods, dark blue wool sweater, Cabela's 25" x 76" sleeping pad, tent poles (orange bag), tent stakes (small brow bag), my lovely axe, 3 sticks of dynamite (kidding, they are flares), black compression sack with clothes, rubber poncho (under flares & compression sack).

The wool blanket is folded into a thick rectangle, roughly the length and width of the pack. It is then laid in first to act as a pad between my back and my gear. My compression sack and mess kit go in the bottom, followed by the tool bag, and tarp, then the first aid kit and my sweater and finally the poncho.  If the weather gets cool I can easily fish out my sweater to add a layer, and if it begins to rain the poncho is on top to throw over myself, or my gear.  We used the poncho to cover our firewood when it threatened rain.  When I solo camp and have my hammock I lay out the poncho on the ground beneath it  to keep my feet clean an dry when getting in and out.

The axe, tent poles, and sleeping pad were all tucked under the three leather straps that close the pack up.

The food pack and Lil' Bastard...

  And then there was the food pack.  I will go a little bit into our favorite dish on the trip in a future post.

Items taken and to be left behind next time:

• Some extra clothing was superfluous.  I wore the same thing the entire trip and washed it every night. I had an extra set of lighter weight clothes that I only used as a pillow at night.
• Snacks; for some reason when I am in the woods I do not get as hungry as often as I do at home.  Leaving behind trail mix and the like would have greatly decreased the weight of our food pack.
• File and stone for axe/knife; I need to invest in a small, lightweight, high-quality stone for sharpening in the field.  Any suggestions?

Items taken, not used, to be taken again:

• First aid kit; fairly self explanatory I think
• Flares; the flares could be used for signaling, or starting a fire in an emergency
• Sweater; bulkier than it is heavy, if it had gotten cold I would have been happy it was taking up space.
• Tarp; had it rained on our trip the tarp would have been priceless.  It can be stretched over the cooking area to provide cover.  If you have ever spent rainy days trapped in a tent you will understand why it is worthwhile to pack a rain-fly.

Items we wished we had:

• Water purifier; we boiled the entire time which worked out well because our trip itinerary was so laid back.  It might have been nice to have a purifier on our day trip though.
• More pizza ingredients!  This will make more since later...

Deer Camp 2011

 We had another successful deer season this year that, yet again, has given us a full larder.  My wife and I each took two deer.  In the picture up above you can see a portion of the crew from this year.  At one point we had 14 hunters*

*Did you know you can fit 14 people in a 4-door Dodge Dakota, armaments included.  Impressive, I know...

My buck

Here you can see the buck I took through the neck (the ONLY place to shoot a deer) at about 40 yards with a .50 caliber flintlock long rifle.  Dropped where he stood.

Shelley's buck

 Shelley took this buck with a .50 caliber in-line.  The ballistic tip bullet she used did amazing amounts of damage from the shock of the bullet.  This was another neck shot and the buck didn't even wiggle.

Dad's buck

My Dad broke from tradition and took this buck literally between the eyes from a whopping 6' away.  How did he get so close?  The trick is all the camo and scent blocking equipment he uses.  If you don't use that stuff you will never get a deer. Obviously...

The Bushcraft Beard

If you have ever considered growing a beard but were not sure it was a good idea I would encourage you to visit this site.

http://www.biggerbetterbeards.org/

All the claims are true, I can attest to that...

Bushcraft vs. Leave-No-Trace: A Response

Brian of "Brian's Backpacking Blog" fame had a post semi-recently asking his readers to chime in on whether buschcraft and leave-no-trace (LNT) are compatible.  I started to write my response in the comment box but then it started to take up A LOT of space, so I decided I would use my own blog as a soap box for my opinion.  And here it is...

Bushcraft for me is the act of participating in nature while taking an "extreme" (my words) view of the LNT principles is the act of passing through nature.  I believe that following the LNT principles as they are written makes them completely compatible with bushcraft. In order to prove my point we are going to explore the 7 principles and my interpretation of them with the juxtaposition of how some LNTers interpret them.

The Seven Principles of Leave-No-Trace:

1. Plan and Prepare Ahead: Fairly straight forward.  If you are camping in winter, don't pack Bermuda shorts, that would just be silly. But seriously, learn as much as you can about where you are going before you go there and pack accordingly.  Think of possible scenarios and make sure you are ready for the probable ones.
2. Travel and Camp on Durable Surfaces:What's a durable surface?  Refer to Principle One and learn if there are any fragile soil types that you need to avoid.  When I was a ranger in the Boundary Waters I always slept on exposed granite.  Pretty damn durable stuff that granite...
3. Dispose of Waste Properly: Another straight forward guideline.  Do not litter.  Idiots litter.  Do not be an idiot.  We will revisit Principal One here, find out if there are backcountry latrines, if so use them, if not find out if cat holes are sufficient, if not maybe you need to pack out your feces.  For me, if I can't get by with a cat hole I do not need to see it.
4. Leave what you find:  This is one I struggle with.  I am who I am today because when I was a boy I filled my pockets with rocks, and acorns, and skulls, and *gasp* picked flowers for my mother.  If I had not done those things, or if I had been told not to do it I think there is a really good chance I would not have developed such a fondness for the outdoors.  I see this a lot in my line of work.  Teachers are often screaming at the kids not to touch anything in nature because they might hurt it or it might be poison ivy.  Which brings us back to Principal One, I'm detecting a pattern here.  Learn if there acceptable things to pick up an take home as souvenirs. You will be impacting the environment less by taking a pebble home as a reminder than if you buy a cheap petroleum based knick-knack that traveled in excess of 5000 miles to arrive at the tourist trap you picked it up at. In Iowa, on public lands nuts, fungus, and berries are fare game.  In National Forests shed antlers are ok to pick up, but antlers attached to a skull are to be left.  I once let a young gentleman who was about 11 years old carry a moose skull with moderately sized spoons out of the Boundary Waters.  Illegal?  Yes.  But if you had seen the pride in that little guys eyes as he passed me on the portage with that skull balanced on his pack you would understand why I did not.  His scout leader said he had found it early in the trip and had carried on each portage, including one portage that was over 500 rods (one rod= 16.5 feet). I console myself in that now he may be majoring in natural resources at a major university because of his experiences on that trip.. There are non-native/invasive flowers, trees, shrubs, etc almost everywhere you go.  Learn what they are an let your little ones pick the flowers and you can cut the trees and shrubs for your spoon carving and buck saws. You will be things out of the forest and leaving a trace, a positive trace. Educate yourself and make a difference.
5. Minimize Campfire Impacts: Note that it does not say "never use a fire" which is how some folks interpret this principal.  Keep your campfires small.  Harvest dead and down wood away from your campsite. Use grate when they are provided.  If you want to use a stove look into making your own like one of my woodsman heroes.  If you think you are "leaving no trace" by using a white gas stove you need to visit a bauxite mine and an oil refinery sometime...
6. Respect Wildlife: Another straight forward principal I think. Leave wildlife alone when camping.  Other wise you could end up like Timothy Treadwell... Oh yes, I just went there...
7. Be Considerate of Other Visitors: Be peaceful and respect other recreational users.  If they are compiling with regulations keep off your soap box.  If you are a hardcore LNTer please do not accost a bushcrafter for practicing there craft if they are not breaking rules.  It is a bad idea.  We carry insanely sharp knives and axes all the time. (That's joke you realize,  sometimes the knives and axes are only moderately sharp).

And that is my take on implementing LNT into bushcrafting.  I'd love to hear your thoughts on the topic, even if the conflict with mine.  I will just be sitting here...sharpening my axe...

Part II: 30 Miles There & Back

Soloing with the Ancients

     The wind did indeed die down and we were able to break camp on an absolutely beautiful clear morning.  The type of morning where the surface of the lake is quite literally like a mirror.  After we broke camp and repacked the canoe I took a minute to plan our route the short distance the a campsite above the upper falls on the Basswood River.

Planning the Route

     We were in very familiar territory for me because I had worked as a wilderness ranger for the Forest Service in this area while I was going to school in Ely.  As a matter of fact the last campsite I stayed in when I was working on the Forest Service trail crew my first summer as a ranger was the last site my wife and I stayed on during this trip.

Portage Break

     The paddle to the campsite was easy, just a couple miles on a glassy surface.  Setting up camp was MUCH less eventful seeing as how no bear visited us this time.  With camp set up we paddled the short distance (maybe 50 yards) to the Basswood River portage which is close to a mile long.  With nothing more than our water bottles, lunch, and day-packs  the portage was a breeze.

Portaging...Like a Boss!!!

     I did rest the canoe against a short pine snag at a point that turned out to be about 70 rods from the end of the portage.  Good canoe rests, where you can simply step out from under the canoe are often hard to find.  Visitors use to lash poles in-between trees at regular intervals on longer portages but the Forest Service takes them down because some feel it diminishes their wilderness experience.  I've been on portage with and without canoe rests and I love them.  They do not do a bit of harm to my wilderness experience, but I'll save that bully pulpit for a later post i think.
     I am not the only one to portage on the trip.  My wife, who weighs only slightly less than our canoe, took more than her fair share of turns participating in this glorious torture. 
     At the end of the mile long portage we sat on the rocks listen to the river flow and gurgle by, took in the beauty of our surroundings, talked and laughed while enjoying our lunch of summer sausage, cheese, crackers, and trail mix. Then it was time to get back on the water and make our way down the rest of the Basswood River to our ultimate goal of Crooked Lake and the Picture Rock located there.

Lower Basswood Falls

The rest of the paddle down the Basswood River was largely uneventful other than my wife's first chance to step on Canadian soil at Wheelbarrow Falls.  She said it felt a lot like American soil but just a little different, eh.
     When we reached the end of the Basswood River at Lower Basswood Falls we took a moment to take  advantage of the timer on our camera and snapped a quick picture for posterity.  Then it was time to hoof it over that last portage on the river and into Crooked Lake.
     We were approaching the terminus of the farthest I had ever been in this part of the Boundary Water so that every new experience that we had was a shared one.  Around each corner, and in each new bay our eyes took in new sites for the first time together.  I love that feeling.

Pictured Rock on Crooked Lake

     What we got to see next was the overarching goal of the entire trip, the Picture Rocks on Crooked Lake.  We have a painting over our fireplace by Francis Lee Jaques that depict the rock with a group of Voyagers paddling by.  It was gift from my parents and it ties our urban lifestyle nicely in with our wilderness life philosophy, and serves as a constant reminder of that fact for me.

Canadian Border Marker

     We snapped a few pictures of the various hieroglyphs on the rocks.  I have included a picture of one of my favorites which looks like a pelican and a large watercraft, which I think looks suspiciously like a viking long ship, but I am biased. Do I think that vikings painted on these rock? Absolutely not.  Is there a chance that the ancients that did the paintings had seen a long ship on some distant trading sojourn to the coast and recorded their memory for countless generations to see? Possibly(hopefully).

Looking-up the Lower Basswood Falls

     Before we made our trip back to our campsite on Basswood Lake my wife took a few pictures of me paddling solo past the Picture Rock to compare to the painting in our living room, then I paddled back over to pick her up next to the border marker I left her by.  While we we taking in our last look we heard a strange rushing noise that sounded a bit like a jet engine just over our heads.  It was loud enough and close enough that I physically ducked.  It turned out to be three Bald Eagles fighting over a fish, and the strange noise was the wind rushing through their wing tips as they would dive bomb each other.  One of the coolest experiences I have ever had in the woods.

Heading  for home

We loaded back up and retraced our steps up the Basswood River to our campsite.  We spent a uneventful evening in camp running over the experiences we had shared, and talked about ours hopes for future trips together.


The following morning we packed up our gear and made the long paddle back to the Fall Lake Campground and our vehicle, stopping at an island on Pipestone Bay for lunch where I took a moment to get a shot of our faithful canoe loaded on the water.

The Last Portage

Four days, 3 nights, 30 miles, and 12 portages later and we were, well a picture is worth a thousand words so here are two-thousand for me to send this post out on...

I Love You Shelley!

30 Miles There & Back: A Boundary Waters Adventure

A glass-calm bay in the Boundary Waters

We moved away from Ely, MN eight years ago when we transferred to the University of Idaho (U of I) after graduation from Vermilion Community College (VCC)and we had not returned since. But not for a lack of desire.  Finally after all these long years it worked out that I had enough vacation days, money set aside, and children old enough to leave with their grandparents for a week that we were able to return.


So on August 20th, 2011 after I worked my job's booth at an area farmers market I raced off to my parents where my lovely wife (and the best paddling partner I have ever had the pleasure of sharing 16 feet of Royalex with) was dropping off our two lovely daughters.  Upon arrival, I was pleasantly surprised that my wife had actually come to a complete stop before unloading the kids.  We parted from the children with some sadness and reservations which my wife exhibited in the somewhat strange reaction of doing a combination of cartwheels mixed with wild sprinting and shouts that might otherwise be construed as joy.


And thus began our 8-hour drive from Iowa to Ely, MN.  The drive up foreshadowed much of how the entire trip (and following weeks) would go: almost non-existent arguing, lots of laughing and conversation.  We arrived in Ely a touch later than we hoped and found the Fall Lake Campground to be completely filled up and, as luck would have it, so were ALL the hotels in Ely.  We ended up staying in a little cabin at the Silver Rapids Lodge for the night; the only place available within an hours drive.

Silver Rapids Lodge Cabin

The cabin was nice but the bed was a touch short for my 6'4" frame, but it was nice to have a shower in the morning.  We had time before we had to check out so we ate a breakfast of bacon and eggs on the porch then went down to the lake (Garden Lake) to drink coffee and watch for loons.  Didn't see any.

Vermilion Community College

Once we had finished our coffee we packed the van back up and drove into Ely where we were going to visit old haunts, pick up souveniers, and basically kill time until 1:00 PM when the campsites at Fall Lake would start to open back up again.


It was amazing how many people that we ran into that we knew and remebered us after eight long years.


In the above photo you can see me standing outside of VCC where I obtained my A.S. in Wilderness Management.

View from Fall Lake Campsite

After lunch we drove back out to Fall Lake and found a BEAUTIFUL campsite with good access to the water for forays in the canoe, we also saw and heard our first Common loon of the trip.  No matter how many times I see and hear them it never gets old.


While we camped at the Fall Lake Campground we had several friends that we went to school with at VCC, and later on , the U of I, stop by for a visit.  We cooked up venison steaks on the fire and I made bannock in a reflector oven, but I'll save that for a future blog post.

Paddling across Newton Lake

The following morning we loaded our car camping gear back in our van and our wilderness gear into the canoe and took off paddling on our glorious 4-day trip into the Boundary Waters.


We paddled across Fall Lake to our first portage of 90 rods ( a rod is 16.5', or roughly the length of a canoe) and double portaged our gear into Newton Lake.

Lunch spot below Pipestone Falls, Pipestone Bay, Basswood Lake

After the relatively short paddle down the length of Newton Lake we arrived at the Newton-Pipestone Portage of 80 rods where we double portaged agin then had a nice lunch on the rocks where we could listen to the Pipestone Falls behind us.

Normally the Newton-Pipestone Portage is as busy as an interstate, but this day it was very quiet, which I liked.




Once we had finished our hasty lunch below the falls we started our long paddle up Pipestone Bay of Basswood Lake, then into Jackfish Bay where we turned to the east, passed through the narrows and into Basswood Lake proper.  




Here we debated whether we should continue paddling up the west shore of Basswood nearer to the Basswood River (and busier campsites) or opt to camp at the first nice site we came to.  We opted for the latter.

Campsite #55 Basswood Lake

We chose a campsite that connected what would have been a large island to the mainland except for a narrow stip of land no more than 30 yards wide.  It had two beautiful sandy beach landings on either side of the isthmus and I thought it would have a good breeze to keep the bugs down. Did I ever hit the nail on the head, but more on that will come later.

Campsite #55 Basswood Lake

My lovely wife started water to boil to purify it, and got supper on the fire while I started on the tent.  Once she had everything going she came over to lend me a hand.  As I got things more under control she turned to check on supper when she said in an amazingly calm voice "Oh look honey, there's a Black bear" and she was right.  


The not too terribly large bear (I guessed it to be around 200 lbs) was bee-lining for our food pack so I bee-lined it for the bear.  I ran straight at the bear, my heart pounding in my ears and I was mildly disconcerted that the bear wasn't leaving yet.  I wasn't sure what I was going to do if I arrived at the food pack and the bear didn't leave but I thought I could take it.  I mean Davy Crockett killed one when he was only three.  How hard can it be really?  But here I jest.  The bear ran like it's ass was on fire once I was in 6' of it an thankfully didn't make off with a morsel of food.


Needless to say I felt like a real badass during supper having defended my wife in the wilderness from a wild animal that eats mostly berries and insect larve(I'm hoping someone over at The Art of Manliness will read this and want an article).

Campsite #55 Basswood Lake

I'd like to say the rest of our stay at Site #55 was uneventful but it wasn't.  Remember how I mentioned I picked the site due to the good breeze it would get to keep the bugs away?  Well it did a bang up job.  Point of fact there were NO bugs our first night, or the entire next day as the breezes picked up to 40 miles per hour with gusts up to 60...


Luckily our tent withstood the wind and no trees fell on us or our gear.  Late the second day in camp the winds died to nothing and the following morning we began the next leg of our trip which I am going to save for another post.  Until then here is a route map of the trip we took. Stay tuned...!

Upper Basswood Falls, Basswood River